Output details

The Voyage: chamber opera (DVD-video, audio CD and score)

In this collaborative work with Stan’s Cafe, commissioned for the New Music 20x12 Cultural Olympiad, the composer was involved in the concept of the opera from the very beginning. The starting-point for the project was a long, narrow factory space where the work was to be performed. This sparked the idea of an audience travelling through a space on a mobile seating bank. The plot, a sportsman’s life story and journey to a competition at which he fails and falls into obscurity, was inspired by the usually short-lived media hype around sports people, which only lasts for as long as the sportsmen perform well, and was devised as a response to the circumstances of the Olympic commission.

Musically, this piece is the culmination of Wolters’ research into microtonal recorder music, which has occupied him since writing his first piece for recorder players Kathryn Bennetts and Peter Bowman in 1997. While mictrotonal playing has always been at the centre of his pieces for the recorder duo, The Voyage positions Bennetts and Bowman playing third-tones against an ensemble of eight recorders and double bass playing tonal diatonic music. This clash corresponds with the design of the libretto and performance, sitting between worlds: ancient and modern, amateur and virtuosic professionalism, diatonic familiarity and microtonal otherness. It is this ambiguity that fascinates Wolters: in his postmodern refusal to take a position he delivers a collection of facts that coexist rather than coalesce into the familiar patterns that an audience would usually rely on. In The Voyage they cannot even be sure of the position of their seat.

The Voyage was first performed at A. E. Harris, Birmingham, on 6 May 2012, broadcast by BBC Radio 3 on 16 June 2012 and is released on NMC Recordings.

Submitted materials: DVD-video; Audio CD (studio recording); Score.